Designing with Friction: Summer 2026 Research Series
A public writing series translating my Ed.D. research on generative AI, pedagogical friction, and durable learning into practical frameworks for K-12 leaders.
Visible performance is not always durable learning.
Generative AI can make academic work look complete while leaving student understanding uncertain. This public series explores how educators and leaders can distinguish helpful ease from the kinds of friction that develop knowledge, judgment, authorship, and agency.
My current study examines how K-12 educators and school-system leaders understand and navigate these questions. The framework I am developing asks when schools should preserve friction, reduce it, or redesign it.
Foundations: policy and governance.
Four posts published ahead of the summer sequence. They set the decision-making context the weekly posts build on: what AI systems are permitted to do, who decides, and how student data is handled.
Writing Policy for the Learning Sequence: Moving Beyond Tool Permission
Why responsible AI policy must address when automation enters the learning process, not only which tools are allowed.
From Assistant to Actor: Navigating the K–12 Procurement Crisis in Agentic AI
A K–12 governance framework for autonomy, memory, tool access, and delegated decision authority.
The Compliance Ghost in the Machine: FERPA, COPPA, and Persistent AI Memory
Persistent AI memory, student data privacy, and the risks of invisible personalization.
Tiered Decision Rights: Governing the Actions of Autonomous Systems
A framework for deciding what AI may generate, recommend, and automate, and what must remain human.
The six-week sequence.
Six posts written across summer 2026, moving from what AI obscures in student work to what institutions must carry for classroom practice to hold. The sequence is complete.
The Illusion of Completion: Why Flawless Student Work Can Signal Zero Learning
Why polished AI-supported performance can make student understanding difficult to see.
Productive vs. Exclusionary Friction: Protecting Learning Without Creating Unnecessary Barriers
Protecting meaningful learning effort without creating avoidable barriers.
Beyond Academic Integrity: AI Is a Learning-Design Problem
Moving from rule enforcement toward learning design.
When Guidance Lags Behind Use: Educator Sensemaking in the Age of AI
How educators navigate effort, access, authorship, and uncertainty when formal guidance is incomplete.
The Load-Bearing Layer: Why AI-Era Learning Design Is an Institutional Problem
How policy, infrastructure, leadership, and professional learning shape what classrooms can sustain.
Governance Is a Design Decision: Why AI Procurement Is Already Shaping Curriculum
How procurement and configuration decisions shape classroom practice before teachers or students use the tools.
A practitioner-friendly framework.
Pedagogical friction
Meaningful resistance learners encounter while building understanding, judgment, skill, and agency.
Productive friction
Challenge that contributes to learning and can be supported without being removed.
Exclusionary friction
A barrier that blocks access or participation without educational benefit.
Noetic friction
The effort of forming, connecting, questioning, and revising ideas.
Rhetorical friction
The work of making claims, selecting evidence, and taking responsibility for expression.
Existential friction
The encounter with uncertainty, ownership, identity, and purpose.
Infrastructural friction
The policies, systems, tools, and conditions that shape what schools can sustain.
Four ways to bring the argument into a room.
Designing with Friction: Protecting Durable Learning in the Age of Generative AI
Keynote or leadership session for educators, leaders, and conference audiences.
Designing with Friction: Classroom Assessment and Assignment Redesign
Practical workshop for teachers, coaches, and curriculum leaders.
Beyond AI Compliance: Policy, Procurement, and Decision Rights for School Leaders
Leadership workshop or board conversation for district decision-makers.
Civic Reasoning and Historical Inquiry in Synthetic Media Environments
Curriculum workshop or conference session for civic-learning audiences.
Public research, no participant data.
This public series shares conceptual frameworks, literature connections, and practitioner-facing reflections connected to my Ed.D. dissertation proposal. It does not report study findings, participant data, interview material, survey responses, school names, or confidential research records. Formal study data, if collected after approval, will remain in secure IRB-approved storage.